NYU Tragedy and the Politics of the Unknown

As a student at NYU, suicide is not a foreign occurrence. Some joke about the “Bobst Diving Team,” while others simply cannot discuss dorm windows without explaining that the school restricts access to air because officials fear students will all kill themselves.

I have never experienced the tragedy of knowing a student who committed suicide at NYU. I can only hope, from the depths of my heart, that I will never have to face that news. I am, however, a member of the University’s community, and I believe that the school as a whole feels each loss in various ways.

As a reporter, tackling death is one of the greatest hardships one can face, and covering suicide is even more difficult for the questions one must ask because the list of victims is not only the name echoed throughout your article, but each subject you interview. During my freshman year, I had to face this reality when contributing an article to an investigative series on the NYU Wellness Exchange, the mainstay of mental health services on campus. In 2007, the school community witnessed multiple suicides and at one point I was tasked with investigating whether students had reached out for help. I had to call and email Allan Oakley Hunter’s father in the wake of his son taking his own life.

I do not remember the content of my various contact with Mr. Hunter. What stands out most in my memory is sitting at my desk in an under-populated newsroom during my afternoon staff shift, rocking in an old rolling chair, and hating myself for the questions I had not even asked yet. My editor gave me a phone number and other contact information, and I dawdled and ultimately just idled in that chair, unsure how to do my job and, moreover, how to handle what doing my job meant.

I hate when people write about losses to which they are unconnected—it feels fake, self-gratifying, and self-important. I have no intention of writing such a piece. I cannot presume to know what the friends, family, or acquaintances of Andrew Williamson-Noble feel. According to Facebook, this latest student to end his life on campus lived in my residence hall. He wears a suit nicely in his profile picture. Yet while his features seem plausibly familiar in the abstract, I know little about him on a personal, immediate level.

Over the last two and a half years I have received emails from New York University president John Sexton regarding four suicides on campus. What I had failed to truly recognize until today’s notice, entitled “The Death of an NYU Student,” was the sense of panic and despair that results not from the news, but from the withholding of substantive information. I know the Wellness Center’s phone number—it’s emblazoned on innumerable items the school has thrust upon me at events since my orientation before school even started, they send me emails, and it is on campus phones all over downtown Manhattan. What I want—what I need desperately—to know in the wake of news of another student death is a name.

In the Bible, God grants Adam the power to name all the creatures of the Earth, giving him power over all other inhabitants of Eden. A name is power. In the wake of tragedy, a name makes the difference between an abstract sense of sorrow and the abject devastation of personal loss. In the hours between receiving confirmed news of a suicide at Bobst library this morning and the release of a name this afternoon, the anxiety and torment of not knowing which group you will fall into is terrible and, I think, wrong.

Upon hearing the news, I mentally ran through people I know well, scanning mental images of recent interactions for signs of depression or desperation. I ran through when I had seen them last, what I had heard of them most recently, trying to piece together the possibilities while incorporating what little I knew of the timeline. Without a name, you exist in a state of emotional freefall, able to sense that hollowness in the pit of your stomach that you feel on a rollercoaster, when you are out of control and have no idea what will happen next. But I like roller coasters. I have dragged friends and family members on roller coasters. This sensation and this painful, anxious uncertainty should not be imposed on others.

We should get a name.